Couch Surfing Professor

December 26, 2008 8:03 PM

There is the story of the perennial house guest who is either a distinguished mathematician or a physicist. The story goes that if this gentleman comes to stay with a young scientist it means that their future in the field is in for a sudden uptick. His tenure in their home tends to result in a few collaborative papers which in turn leads to notice in the scientific community and a rapid rise in status. Please help me find this professor's name?
posted by cm to science & nature (14 comments total)

Paul Erdos?
posted by Maias at 8:05 PM on December 26, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Seconded
posted by quarantine at 8:07 PM on December 26, 2008

Yeah, gotta be Erdos.
posted by orthogonality at 8:12 PM on December 26, 2008

Fascinating story.
posted by qwip at 8:46 PM on December 26, 2008

In mathematical (and related) communities, people discuss their "Erdos Number" -- the degrees of separation, measured by co-authorship, of that person to Erdos.

The late Erdos uniquely has an Erdos number of 0. If you co-authored a paper with Erdos, yours is 1. Your co-authors on other papers, if they do not otherwise have a lower Erdos Number, have an Erdos Number of 2.

Mine is somewhere around 5, I think.

Recommendation: Hoffman, Paul. 1998. The man who loved only numbers: the story of Paul Erdos and the search for mathematical truth. New York: Hyperion.
posted by quarantine at 8:54 PM on December 26, 2008

Erdős is the subject of the biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, which I thought was an enjoyable read.
posted by hattifattener at 8:55 PM on December 26, 2008

(Doh. I console myself for my duplicate answer with the fact that I'm the first person to spell his name correctly, with the double-acute.)
posted by hattifattener at 9:06 PM on December 26, 2008

Previously, on MetaFilter.
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:17 PM on December 26, 2008

The story goes that if this gentleman comes to stay with a young scientist it means that their future in the field is in for a sudden uptick.

He also apparently was unable to do anything for himself, like laundry or buying coffee. His mother (I think) travelled with him.

I have heard he was responsible for the saying "a mathematician is a machine for turning caffeine into theorems" (although I have also heard that it wasn't caffeine, but amphetamines, that he discussed.)

The American Mathematical Society has an Erdos number calculator calculator.

Erdos number 2 here --- as soon as a couple things actually get into print.
posted by leahwrenn at 4:15 AM on December 27, 2008

I found a brief reminiscence about Erdös with some intriguing details about his eccentricities:

His brilliance was evident by the time he was three years old. For this reason, and perhaps because two older sisters died of scarlet fever shortly before he was born, his parents shielded him almost completely from the everyday problems of life. For example, he never had to tie his own shoelaces until he was 14 years old, and never buttered his own toast until he was 21 years old in Cambridge, England. In return for the freedom to concentrate almost exclusively on intellectual pursuits, he paid the price of not learning the social skills that are expected of all of us and usually acquired in childhood.
posted by jamjam at 11:04 AM on December 27, 2008

Oops, Premature Posting Finger (PPF) claims a new victim-- I was intending to put the quotation in italics and posted my comment instead.

Here is the link.
posted by jamjam at 11:10 AM on December 27, 2008

Your question brought to mind this page honoring an academic houseguest, which I found amusing.
posted by jayder at 12:47 PM on December 27, 2008

People seem to think the better biography is My Brain is Open.

I recommend checking out the Erdős documentary called N is a Number, which is up on YouTube in six parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
posted by parudox at 4:40 PM on December 28, 2008

That he had two sisters who died of scarlet fever is interesting because it raises the possibility of a genetic familial predisposition to vulnerability to strep-A infection, the cause of scarlet fever, and also the cause of Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep-A (PANDAS) which has been nominated as a cause of Asperger's, and because Erdös' eccentricities and brilliancies look a lot like high-functioning Asperger's:

Hans Asperger's initial accounts[1] and other diagnostic schemes[26] include descriptions of physical clumsiness. Children with AS may be delayed in acquiring skills requiring motor dexterity, such as riding a bicycle or opening a jar--or tying one's shoes or spreading butter, perhaps.

Erdös also displayed what seems to me a very odd symptom of AS: use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker. From the memoir I linked in the previous post:

Erdös had a special vocabulary that he concocted and used consistently in his speech. Some samples are:

* Children are Epsilons
* Women are Bosses
* Men are Slaves
* Married Men have been Captured
* Alcoholic Drinks are Poison
* God is The Supreme Fascist or SF
* Music is Noise.

Examples:

I asked Barbara Piranian (President of the League of Women Voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the early 1950s) "When will you bosses take the vote away from the slaves?" Answer :"There is no need; we tell them how to vote anyway."

"Wine, women, and song" becomes "Poison, bosses, and noise".
posted by jamjam at 5:53 PM on December 28, 2008